Last year I got a curious e-mail buried in the pile of auto-responses that clogged my inbox. Someone using a forged @limpag.com address not only sent spam to scores of poor souls all over the world, he or she also spammed Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer.

That spurred me into action. I use my limpag.com domain for my personal e-mail as well as that of immediate family members.

I initially used Windows Live Custom Domains to manage my limpag.com e-mails. But I, as well as other Limpags, didn’t use it much. For one, it came with the old Hotmail interface and while it promised a 25MB storage for non-US folks, we only got 2MB of inbox storage because you had to undergo a verification process in order to get the full 25MB.

When Google launched its Google Apps for domains, I immediately transferred e-mail service. Google Apps lets you manage your domain’s e-mails through GMail, and with it came excellent spam controls and a 2Gb of storage. It also offers such things as a shared online calendar as well as documents storage.

It was after the transfer that I noticed that spammers were forging e-mail addresses using my domain. My main limpag.com e-mail addresses was getting auto-replies indicating that spam messages, including e-mails with virus attachments, were being sent from @limpag.com addresses.

Mon.itor.us, a free service that monitors the availability of your web server, now sends weekly PDF reports on the uptime of your websites. The report provides a snapshot of the availability of your site within the week. The weekly PDF report seemed a recent addition to its already formidable lineup of services. This is still the second time I’ve received one.

PDF REPORT. Mon.itor.us sends a weekly report on the availability of servers you are monitoring. Click on image to enlarge.

Of course, you can always go to your mon.itor.us account to view detailed statistics not only on your web server availability but also on response times. Mon.itor.us monitors web server performance from three different locations—Germany, Austria, and the United States.

Of all the free web server monitoring services I tried, mon.itor.us is the most consistent and dependable. It’s is usually the first to alert me whenever any of the sites I monitor is down. This means mon.itor.us checks availability more frequently than the other services.

Mon.itor.us also provides its users detailed records of the response times of web servers. You can view the response time of your site, from which country and on what hour of any given day since you signed up for its service.

Media Temple, in the first days after launching its widely-hyped GridServer hosting, seemed to deliver on its grandiose 100% uptime promise. The figures I was getting in early monitoring of Media Temple uptime, and a host of other web hosting services, was tempting me to sign up with them for a project that was still at an early stage.

I’ve since changed my mind. I will be using my current web host, the dependable A Small Orange, for the new project. MediaTemple has apparently failed to sustain its 100% availability, based on my monitoring using mon.itor.us and the posts of scores of its own customers. The downtime was significant that it generated an article in Netcraft.

And even if it got good http uptime performance for several days, there were a lot of complaints regarding Media Temple’s database connections, a huge issue for those that depend on PHP/MySQL scripts, such as WordPress, to run their websites.

Media Temple’s promise of 100% uptime with their Grid-Server hosting may sound too good to be true.

I initially thought that it’s chief executive officer’s statement that they are actually considering paying customers, on top of granting them rebates, whenever there is a downtime as coming close to a boast.

I know better now. The 100% server uptime is true.

No, I’m not hosted with Media Temple, yet — although I’m considering a transfer to the Grid-Server — but I’ve been monitoring an account hosted with their servers. When I read about the Grid-Server offering, I searched for a website hosted with them so that I could monitor that site using mon.itor.us, a tool I wrote about earlier.